Iranians were legally whitened and immediately targeted with racial hostility

Evidence

Ironically, it was the 1979 revolution that produced the migration of between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand newly official “white/Caucasian” Iranians to the United States and at the same time engendered and fomented new levels of racialized hostility, discrimination, and bias faced by Iranians upon arrival. Less than twelve months after being officially and legally whitened in the United States, a critical mass of Iranian migrants were swiftly and sometimes violently excluded from the white body politic. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 81

Categorization

• XREF: The legal-white-but-socially-nonwhite gap parallels the tension in the reader’s other readings on constructed whiteness (e.g., the Soundscape/silence work on perceptible vs. regulable categories). — connects to: Iranian experience reveals what official whiteness can and cannot protect. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 66; Iranians were legally white but socially browned after the hostage crisis — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 118

Related

• Iranians were legally white but socially browned after the hostage crisis (similarity 0.89)
• Iranian experience reveals what official whiteness can and cannot protect. (similarity 0.88)
• Census whiteness contradicts the everyday social exclusion of Iranian Americans (similarity 0.85)
• Assimilation markers give Iranian Americans little protection from racist portrayal (similarity 0.85)
• Iranian Americans arrived with legal whiteness and Aryan nationalist ideologies (similarity 0.85)
• Some Iranians arrive believing in an inherited racial whiteness (similarity 0.85)
• Iranian Americans face discrimination legally invisible because they are white by law. (similarity 0.84)
• Iranians are legally white yet visibly raced in daily life (similarity 0.84)
• Iranians are legally white yet socially non-white in America (similarity 0.84)
• Iranians have been positioned across the American color line for over a century. (similarity 0.83)
• Socioeconomic success and legal whiteness do not guarantee protection from racial browning (similarity 0.83)
• Middle Easterners are too white for legal redress yet too non-white to escape racism (similarity 0.83)
• Social whiteness on the ground remains elusive for Iranian Americans (similarity 0.83)
• Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools (similarity 0.83)
• Iranians functioned as a racial hinge anchoring others’ claims to whiteness (similarity 0.82)